Secularization

Secularization (Lat., saeculum, ‘age’ or ‘world’, i.e. this world). The (supposed) process whereby people, losing confidence in other-worldly or supernatural accounts of the cosmos and its destiny, abandon religious beliefs and practices, or whereby religion loses its influence on society. Secularization is an elusive and much-debated concept. In origin, the term referred to the alienation of Church property to the State, and thence to the loss of temporal power by the Church. It referred also to the process whereby ordained clergy reverted to the lay state. It then came more loosely to refer to the transition from the religious to the non-religious world. At this preliminary level, it is possible to treat religion and the secular at the level of ideology (despite the fact that ideology is itself a complex concept), and to understand the process as one in which one ideology is compelled to give way to another. This is the account offered by D. Cupitt in a widely read book, The Sea of Faith (1984).

The weakness of this account is that it fails to recognize the fact that religions in novel circumstances react in vastly different ways, ranging from adaptation to resistance, but more frequently by failing to act as ideology at all, and by doing complementary, not competitive things. More responsibly, therefore, Bryan Wilson proposed the ‘secularization thesis’ (e.g. Religion in Secular Society, 1966). Defining secularization as ‘the process whereby religious thinking, practices and institutions lose social significance’, he argued, not that people have necessarily lost interest in religion, nor that they have adopted a new ideology, but more restrictedly that religion has ceased to have any significance for the working of the social system. Many problems in this position have been exposed, ranging from the measures and methods of social significance (in the past as much as in the present) to the relevance of a contingent observation about the distribution of power to the understanding of religion. Religions clearly duck and weave through the vicissitudes of history, and are not in some single and invariant conflict with a reality which can be defined as ‘secularization’.

For these (and other) reasons, T. Luckmann argued that ‘the notion of secularisation offers a largely fictitious account of the transformations of religion in Western society during the past centuries’ (Life-World and Social Realities, 1983), and called this spurious account ‘the myth of secularisation’: its basic mistake is to tie religion to the institutional forms it has happened to take, and then to measure religion by the fortunes (or misfortunes) of those institutions. It may be, therefore, that the phenomena which have evoked the term ‘secularization’ would be much better considered as a consequence of roughly three centuries of often bitter struggle to maximize the autonomy of individuals and (increasingly in contradiction) of markets. In political terms, the consequence of the struggle is referred to as ‘democracy’. It is a commitment to the maximum freedom of choice for individuals and groups within the boundary of law. It is, in brief, a preferential option for options. But quite apart from its pressure to disentangle Church from State, it also has had the consequence of making religion optional, where once it was less so. But this understanding of secularization, while it does indeed raise problems for institutions, and may drive them to ‘market’ themselves as though a commodity, does not threaten the basic ‘religiousness’ of humanity; for the supposition that Weber's ‘shift to rationalisation’ will leave religions behind has proved already to be false.